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Chromium for the Masses

Every time my paycheck is direct-deposited, I contemplate purchasing a
Chromebook. Long gone are the days of the CR-48 laptops with the clunky
interface and frustrating usability. Although I never quite seem to pull
the trigger and buy a Chromebook, thanks to the developer Hexxeh,
it's possible to run the Chromium OS on a wide variety of hardware
combinations. I'm writing this on my Dell Latitude D420 booted into
Hexxeh's Vanilla build of Chromium. (I'm using the excellent Chrome App
Writebox as an editor.) You can get the most recent build of Vanilla
from Hexxeh's Web site: http://chromeos.hexxeh.net.

The exciting news, however, has nothing to do with laptops at all. Like
most Linux-based pseudo-embedded projects, Hexxeh's Chromium build is
getting ported to the Raspberry Pi. Once complete, a Chromium-enabled
Raspberry Pi desktop machine will be a very affordable, power-sipping
alternative to Google's ChromeBox units. Projects like this really beg
the question: is there anything the Raspberry Pi can't do? For more
details on the Pi port, visit Hexxeh's blog: http://hexxeh.net.

Shawn is Associate Editor here at Linux Journal, and has been around Linux since the beginning. He has a passion for open source, and he loves to teach. He also drinks too much coffee, which often shows in his writing.